After googling a bit it seems there is no multi-line comment support in Erlang, is this really the case?
And if so, why?
I know some editors support commenting out regions (adding % first on every line of the region) but i don't really want to pick editor based on this.
It's simple. Use preprocessor:
-ifdef(comment).
Something to comment
You can add text or
function(Declaration) ->
...
Which will removed from file
-endif.
There are no multi-line comments in Erlang.
In general, I haven't found this to be a big deal: I use templates for gen_server and supervisor and a general template for other modules, and all of these include the boilerplate top doc blocks. I get some template support from my editor (Emacs) but you could be editor-agnostic and just write some templates and copy them to any new modules you want.
The biggest use of multi-line comments other than documentation is to comment-out a big chunk of code. Since your Erlang code should generally be small functions, you can just comment out the function call, which is a one-line comment.
While it is easy enough to set the language for a given (open) file in Sublime Text, I'm wondering if there is any way that I can tell the editor in advance that anything called "Guardfile" should be highlighted like it's Ruby code. Does anyone know how to do this?
The plugins recommended in the comments by Brian both do the job nicely:
ApplySyntax
SyntaxFromFileName
Update:
I couldn't get SyntaxFromFileName to match any of my regex for some reason. On the other hand, DetectSyntax comes with syntax highlight for the Guardfile built in.
Update2:
DetectSyntax has been renamed to ApplySyntax
Putting the following at the top of said file also works
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
I've got MMM-mode set up to edit .html.erb files, but indentation does not work in the ruby sections, and all the different electric behaviours of ruby-mode do the wrong thing. I've changed this sub-mode from ruby-moode to fundamental-mode, and it works much better.
I want to still use ruby-mode's font-locking though, is this possible/easy? Any hints on where to start.
Elisp is comfortable to me, but I don't have too much time right now to dig too deeply myself. Hopefully someone will have a snippet?
I see you haven't yet found an answer. Dunno whether it will be better for this, but you might consider using MuMaMo instead of MMM.
To answer the question, you would define a major mode deriving from fundamental-mode, and in its body just copy the font-lock-related lines from the ruby-mode definition body, the ones setting font-lock- variables and also syntax-propertize-function. Naturally , you need to (require 'ruby-mode) somewhere.
But for .html.erb files I can now recommend using mmm-erb, which was not available when this question was asked.
I've been using Netbeans for Rails and like it a lot, considering how little I paid for it. But something that bothers me is that when I'm editing an RHTML or ERB file, it doesn't do the code autocomplete - or at least not reliably. Sometimes it shows the appropriate variables and methods that are available on an object after you type the dot operator. Sometimes it ignores the instance variables. Is there a solution for this? (Please don't say RadRails).
Oh and one more thing in case anyone has solved this: considering how often I have to type <% when I'm in a Rails template, I wish there was some hotkey for autotyping the tag . . . ? I always have to stop and look down at my keyboard to find the < and % keys before I can type the tag so it's not as trivial as it might sound.
I believe you're looking for something like this:
http://ruby.netbeans.org/codetemplates-rhtml.html
Type in one of the triggers, then hit the tab key to expand it to the code as given.
Also, you might want to explore using HAML. It's much easier on the hands.
I need a way to add text comments in "Word style" to a Latex document. I don't mean to comment the source code of the document. What I want is a way to add corrections, suggestions, etc. to the document, so that they don't interrupt the text flow, but that would still make it easy for everyone to know, which part of the sentence they are related to. They should also "disappear" when compiling the document for printing.
At first, I thought about writing a new command, that would just forward the input to \marginpar{}, and when compiling for printing would just make the definition empty. The problem is you have no guarantee where the comments will appear and you will not be able to distinguish them from the other marginpars.
Any idea?
todonotes is another package that makes nice looking callouts. You can see a number of examples in the documentation.
Since LaTeX is a text format, if you want to show someone the differences in a way that they can use them (and cherry pick from them) use the standard diff tool (e.g., diff -u orig.tex new.tex > docdiffs). This is the best way to annotate something like LaTeX documents, and can be easily used by anyone involved in the production of a document from LaTeX sources. You can then use standard LaTeX comments in your patch to explain the changes, and they can be very easily integrated. If the document lives in a version control system of some sort, just use the VCS to generate a patch file that can be reviewed.
I have used changes.sty, which gives basic change colouring:
\added{new text}
\deleted{old text}
\replaced{new text}{old text}
All of these take an optional parameter with the initials of the author who did this change. This results in different colours used, and these initials are displayed superscripted after the changed text.
\replaced[MI]{new text}{old text}
You can hide the change marks by giving the option final to the changes package.
This is very basic, and comments are not supported, but it might help.
My little home-rolled "fixme" tool uses \marginpar where possible and goes inline in places (like captions) where that is hard to arrange. This works out because I don't often use margin paragraphs for other things. This does mean you can't finalize the layout until everything is fixed, but I don't feel much pain from that...
Other than that I heartily agree with Michael about using standard tools and version control.
See also:
Tips for collaboratively editing a LaTeX document (which addresses you main question...)
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/193298/best-practices-in-latex
and a self-plug:
How do I get Emacs to fill sentences, but not paragraphs?
You could also try the trackchanges package.
You can use the changebar package to highlight areas of text that have been affected.
If you don't want to do the markup manually (which can be tedious and interrupt the flow of editing) the neat latexdiff utility will take a diff of your document and produce a version of it with markup added to visually display the changes between the two versions in the typeset output.
This would be my preferred solution, although I haven't tested it out on large, multi-file documents.
The best package I know is Easy Review that provides the commenting functionality into LaTeX environment. For example, you can use the following simple commands such as \add{NEW TEXT}, \remove{OLD TEXT}, \replace{OLD TEXT}{NEW TEXT}, \comment{TEXT}{COMMENT}, \highlight{TEXT}, and \alert{TEXT}.
Some examples can be found here.
The todonotes package looks great, but if that proves too cumbersome to use, a simple solution is just to use footnotes (e.g. in red to separate them from regular footnotes).
Package trackchanges.sty works exactly the way changes.sty. See #Svante's reply.
It has easy to remember commands and you can change how edits will appear after compiling the document. You can also hide the edits for printing.